Contextual Inquiry Plan

Our design is to connect prospective students with colleges to simplify the process of finding a school that is right for them. While our target users are prospective students, features of our design will also be affected by admission officers, because they represent the college’s interests. Thus we will interview both prospective students and admission officers. Specificially, due to the scope of this project, we will interview prospective students visiting Williams College, and also Williams College admission officers. We will interview them separately. We plan to observe our participants during an information session, and interview them after. In particular, for the first interview, there will be an information session at 1:45 pm on Friday, Februrary 21st. For more interviews, there will be two information sessions every workday. We will let the admission office know ahead of time that we will be conducting an interview.

Our detailed inquiry plan is as follows. We will first sit in on an admissions office presentation, observing how our participants interact with the information provided in these events. For applicants, we will note whether or not they seem engaged with the material, what parts of the presentation seem especially resonant with the participant, and any active engagement (asking questions, etc.) that they have during the presentation. For admissions officers, we will observe how they present the college and what information sources they rely on to give applicants a picture of campus life. Unfortunately, because of the structure of these settings, we will likely not be able to actively ask questions of our participants during the information session. Instead, we will conduct interviews immediately after the session is over, asking the participant about their thoughts on what they heard/presented and how they would like to see it changed. Again, we will have similar focuses in our interviews for both the admissions officers and applicants, but will tailor the wording and content of our questions to their unique perspectives. These interviews will focus on what participants have found most useful in the college search process, what sources of information they use to learn or present about colleges, and what they feel is lacking in the information available to them. We plan to use a semi-structured interview approach as described by Nielsen, developing a set of topics that we will cover in each interview but allowing our participants to answer how they see fit and continuing down unexpected paths of inquiry if they arise.